I’ve been MIA for the past few weeks, but I’ll get to that later today or later this week. Right now, I want to tell you how much I hate sifting through government documents.
Okay, hate might be too strong of a word but finding the exact information I need and then interpreting the wording is no walk in the park. I feel like it’s the kind of thing people go and study for years before earning their degree in it.
Seeing as how my time is winding down here (in the next two months, the group that arrived before me will make their way back to the States making my group “The Old Guard,” if you will). It’s got me, once again, in the mind-frame of, “What am I going to do when I get back and what will I have to do that with?”
More specifically, I want to know how much money I’m making monthly and will come into my bank accounts when I get home. We are volunteers, but Peace Corps makes sure we have money to make up for the things we sold or will need when we get back to America after our service. They call this our “Readjustment Allowance.” After about twenty minutes of searching, I finally came across MS 223 Volunteer/Trainee Readjustment Allowance, which outlines how much money I make for different things. It’s paid in two lump sums at the end of service, which is nice because I’m not spending it while I’m here (could be the reason it’s called “Readjustment”).
Anyway, the wording still has me a little confused and it makes it unclear about how much money I’ll be getting. I’m almost dead set on one number but I can’t help but question it. Here’s the wording:
The Readjustment Allowance is set at $275 per month during a Volunteer’s first full tour of service. The Readjustment Allowance is set at $275 per month for Trainees. For Volunteers who extend their tour of service beyond 24 months from their oath date, and for Peace Corps Response Volunteers, the rate is $375 per month.
Since a “tour of service” is twenty-seven months (three months of training, twenty-four months of service), I would assume it means I’ll be given a total of $7,425 when I return. But it’s the part about the training that has me confused because we always hear things about trainees going home and what that actually means. Maybe I misheard, but it always sounded like trainees didn’t start accruing their readjustment allowance.
Either way, it’s a difference of $825. Not exactly a ton of money but it would be nice to have it. That $825 is $825 less of student loan debt I’ll have to figure out when I get home. If I get that $825 and then compound it with the money I have in a CD, that means I’ll only have somewhere around $6k in student loan debt to worry about. It’s all good, I plan on selling out the man when I get back and I’ll be a millionaire by the time I’m 30, but I’ll settle for half of that in cash. Either way, I like my prospects.